calimac

I wish we'd had a player piano at home. In the 70s, I wanted a Pianocorder, and now they have pianos that record to a computer. I can do that with what I have, but the keys don't go up and down when it plays back, so where's the fun in that? (VanBasco's Karaoke Player is a freeware program that simulates a player piano on a PC. I use it for playing with the piano rolls that Terry Smythe scans and puts up on his page.) Grandma Babbit's old piano had been a player piano, but around 1950, Dad removed the player mechanisms for reasons that were probably sound, but which seemed vastly unfair to me. The Steck grand piano in his studio at Colorado State University was formerly a Duo-Art piano, and some of the tubes could still be seen. At least I did get to play with player pianos at the music store Dad worked at for years. I'm still looking for that version of "Hindustan."

It's possible that the dynamic adjustment on your QRS piano was shut off or had lost some function over the years. Player pianos are rather temperamental. Tubes and bellows get stiff and cracky (which I expect is why Dad took the works out of Grandma's old piano), and after a while the things just hiss a lot.

Smythe, incidentally, scans a number of QRS and Duo-Art rolls along with non-expressive ones. There are even organ rolls. No orchestrions or Violinolas, though, that I know of. I think he's gotten more than 5,000 rolls available for download now in about 20 zip files.